One of most interesting high-tech well-travelled blogs is that written by Joi Ito.
He’s touring the world now: having left Japan; he’s just hit les blogs in Paris.
He praises Seth Godin and his latest book All Marketers Are Liars. The idea is that facts don’t sell products: the story behind the products sells them.
That’s true, for lots of products from things as inexpensive as cola to things as expensive as automobiles. (Consider the safety story of Volvo. It’s probably a well-engineered safe car, but the way Volvo has taken the high ground about safety makes the consumer think it’s the safest car — a very different thing.)
Another useful book by Godin is Free Prize Inside!: The Next Big Marketing Idea which stresses the power of small improvements to give a product a selling edge. Godin calls this “soft innovation.”